The Renewed Relevance of Hamilton

I do recall Hillary quoting some of Hamilton during her acceptance speech. Now a new article. Of course Hamilton is important. We are coming into an administration whose goal is to destroy our culture. That I believe.




The Renewed Relevance of “Hamilton”

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-renewed-relevance-of-hamilton?mbid=social_twitter


By Rebecca Mead , November 21, 2016






The musical “Hamilton,” featuring Javier Muñoz in the title role, was back in the headlines this weekend after Mike Pence, the Vice-President-elect, attended a performance. Photograph by Sara Krulwich / The New York Times / Redux

In the immediate aftermath of the Presidential election, as it became necessary to process an appalling new reality—What does this mean for the undocumented? What does this mean for women? What does this mean for people of color? What does this mean for the economy, for the children, for the planet?—it seemed a tiny, trivializing thought: What does this mean for “Hamilton”? Even for those of us who pay attention to the cultural scene—who hold that the arts can give expression to social currents that have yet to be articulated by political commentators, who believe that a play or a novel or a painting can provide an opportunity for a different future to be imagined into existence—it seemed too soon, as the expression goes, to be much concerned with the continuing relevance of the cultural juggernaut that “Hamilton” has become.

Had the seductions of “Hamilton,” and its inspiring creative alignment with the arc of the Obama Presidency, lured us into a muzzy, misguided conviction that a sufficiency of American voters would wish to identify with its message of inclusivity and progress, just as Hillary Clinton had done by quoting from the musical in the concluding words of her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention? Was the election “a vote against ‘Hamilton,’ ” as Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, argued in the Boston Globe, a mere week after votes were cast? Were those of us who had hailed the show’s revolutionary power when it opened at the Public Theatre, two years ago, to be left, after all, with nothing to fall back on but our over-listened-to cast albums, and a few Moana tweets? Well, maybe. But in the face of teen hijabis being harassed in Midwestern high schools, and swastikas being daubed upon Brooklyn playgrounds, it seemed beside the point to attempt to muster a line of argument either way. You know: Broadway problems.

Then, this weekend, “Hamilton” was back in the headlines, after Mike Pence, the Vice-President-elect, took his daughter and some relatives to Friday evening’s performance. ...................






..................Toward the end of September, just before the first of the Presidential debates, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail, along with Ron Chernow, whose biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired the show, were honored with an award at the National Archive Foundation. Reflecting upon “Hamilton” ’s relevance for the political contest that was under way, Kail described the show as “a display of the promise of what’s possible—what it meant, at a moment in time, at a series of moments in time, when it was all out there in front of us, and maybe it could be.” Kail went on, “I think it is also making us feel, hopefully, in some way connected to another truth, which is that it is still the case. So we must keep going.” Miranda’s own response to Trump’s victory was to pre-release a salient track from the forthcoming “Hamilton Mixtape,” a reworking of songs from the show by various artists. The track takes its title, “Immigrants, We Get the Job Done,” from a line in the show that has only increased in resonance during Trump’s ascendancy—it received a standing ovation on the night that Pence was in the audience—and that has taken on a new, alarming urgency with Trump’s selection of the anti-immigration hard-liner Senator Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General.

The song is performed by K’naan, the Somali-Canadian rapper; Snow Tha Product, a Mexican-American hip-hop artist; Riz MC, the British-Pakistani actor also known as Riz Ahmed; and Residente, the Puerto Rican rap artist, who delivers scathing lines that might have been written specifically to address the new Developer-in-Chief. (“Con un pico, una pala / Y un rastrillo / Te construimos un castillo”—“With a pick, a shovel / And a rake / We built you a castle.”) “This election cycle has brought xenophobia and vilification of immigrants back to the forefront of US politics. This is a musical counterweight,” Miranda wrote in an annotation to the song on Genius. Let us hope that Pence will be exposed to Miranda’s timely addendum: perhaps his daughter, Audrey, who is a student at Northeastern University, majoring in international affairs, and who has described herself as socially liberal, will buy him a copy of the mixtape for the holidays, or, as Trump would prefer it said, Christmas. The rest of us can listen, too, with the hope, however blunted by recent experience, that art can offer a perspective upon the unprecedented performance—a bastard combination of opéra bouffe, horror movie, and Shakespearean tragedy—that is being played out daily on the national stage.



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Hillary Clinton Quotes Hamilton in DNC Acceptance Speech

http://www.playbill.com/article/hillary-clinton-quotes-hamilton-in-dnc-acceptance-speech

By Robert Viagas
Jul 29, 2016
See how Lin-Manuel Miranda responded.


Hillary Rodham Clinton quoted the Broadway musical Hamilton at the climax of her July 28 speech accepting the nomination from the Democratic Party for President of the United States.

In the section of the speech where she talked about how the real goal of America is to create a greater future for our children, Clinton said, “Though ’we may not live to see the glory,‘ as the song from the musical Hamilton goes, ‘let us gladly join the fight.’ Let our legacy be about ’planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.’ That's why we're here...not just in this hall, but on this Earth. The Founders showed us that.”

Here is her complete speech. The Hamilton quote comes at the 55:12 mark:................